


Nothing a Little Duct Tape Can't Fix

by Masu_Trout



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Archaic Medical Treatment, Community: hc_bingo, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Robot/Human Relationships, The Commonwealth's Most Stubborn Man, Wasteland medicine, vs The Commonwealth's Most Stubborn Synth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 23:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16942926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Nate's fine. Completely and utterly fine. Sure, his leg might be a bit horribly fractured, courtesy of a super mutant with a sledgehammer, but with the way his life's been going a little thing like that hardly counts asunusualanymore.(Or: Nick worries too much, Nate doesn't worry enough, and duct tape heals all wounds.)





	Nothing a Little Duct Tape Can't Fix

**Author's Note:**

> Written for hc_bingo, and the prompt _archaic medical treatment_.

“Nate,” Nick starts, looking down at the scene with something approaching horror, “sorry to say, but there's only one of us here who ought to be using duct tape that way and it sure as hell ain't you.”

It's a moment before Nate can respond. The pain's right on the edge of manageable, just sharp enough it's starting to make him a little lightheaded, and he can't focus on both talking and tearing right now. “You worry too much,” he says once he's got a nice long strip of tape free. “It's not as bad as it looks. Promise.”

“Legs do not bend that way,” Nick hisses, and now he actually sounds queasy. He'd probably be a little bit green by now if he had the skin for it. As it is, his metal hand is drumming a nervous rhythm against his thigh and his eyes are flicking back and forth in their sockets. They make soft little clicking noises as his gaze shifts down to Nate's leg, up to his face, then back down again.

“Well, clearly they do—you've got the evidence right here, detective.” 

Admittedly, it does look pretty nasty. He's pretty sure he fractured his tibia and the fibula along with it; the bottom quarter of his leg juts out at an interesting angle and the skin already looks swollen and ready to bruise. It's a lucky thing the bone didn't break through the flesh entirely. With how hard that super mutant hit him… well, it's a lucky thing he still has a leg at all, really.

He owes Nick for that. It was Nick who made the shot right through the super mutant's eye in the moment before it could turn Nate into a smear of jellied meat; Nick who dragged him to relative safety in a shelled-out building with three walls still standing, muttering apologies along the way every time he jostled Nate's leg badly enough to make him moan. 

Normally this would be right about the time he'd start dosing up on stimpaks, but stimpaks only make fractures worse unless the bones are set first. The longer he sits here, the more Med-X is starting to sound like a good option. It's only the sure knowledge that he'd never be able to operate on himself under _that_ particular influence that keeps him from rummaging through his bag right now.

Instead, he distracts himself by looking back up at Nick. He's always a pleasant sight, even as rattled as he looks right now, and if the pain were any less of a drag on his senses he might be tempted to sit and watch a while. There's something about a man in a trench coat that he really appreciates. 

“You want to help?” he asks. “I'm not going to be too useful until I get this fixed up.” Maybe having something to do will stop Nick from worrying quite so much.

“Fixed up? We need to get you to a doctor. Now.”

Nate snorts. “It's not that bad—we used to get worse than this all the time back in Alaska. A little bit of TLC and I'll be fine in no time.” 

That war was really was hell. The cold and the under-rationing and the knowledge they were killing men who didn't deserve death any more than they themselves did all pressed together, day in and day out, into one miserable, unrelenting slog. Alaska was where he first learned to splint a limb with scrap metal and duct tape, where he taught himself how to hold a man's intestines inside his stomach until the medic could be pulled away from more important surgeries to visit their tent, where he discovered that just about anything could be food if you closed your eyes and pretended hard enough.

People tend to expect certain emotions out of him when they find out he's a relic: horror at the state of the world, maybe, or some sort of miserable melancholic nostalgia. It's not as if there's nothing he misses—his child, his wife, the taste of clean water—but even the wasteland at its worst doesn't come close to the misery he nearly drowned in back then. For one, he never has to feel guilty when it's a deathclaw's head he's putting a bullet into.

After a moment of hesitation, Nick bends down to examine Nate's broken bone more closely. “…You're going to try this stupid plan whether I'm here or not, aren't you?”

“Ab-so-lutely.”

Nick sighs as he pinches the bridge of his nose with his gleaming metal fingers. “Fine, then. Tell me how I can help.”

Nate grins. Nick's another plus in the wasteland's favor, now that he thinks about it. 

“Okay, basically I'm going to need you to help me hold my leg in place while I get the splint on, because it's going to hurt like hell and it'll be tough to hold myself still while I'm working on it.” Ideally Nick would be the one binding the leg, but Nate's pretty sure he's never done anything like that before and now's really not the time to be teaching him. Not with the super mutants still skulking around. 

It'll be fine, he thinks. At least here he's not up to his knees in snow and trying to keep his fingers from freezing off.

“You _sure_ you don't want to just use a stimpak?” Nick asks. “I have it on good authority that the healing process involves much less screaming that way.”

“Yeah, and fucks up my leg while it's at it. I'm not going to last long out here if I can't run properly.” 

There's an old joke, pre-war, that Nate can't help but remember occasionally: _you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the guy running next to you._ It's mostly funny in how much it _isn't_ true these days—super mutants travel in groups, Institute synths never stop chasing once they've locked on a target, and deathclaws are liable to kill the both of you and drag your bodies back to its lair to snack on. 

(Smart animals, deathclaws. He'd be really fond of them if they just tried to kill him a little less.)

Nick makes a pained sort of face at that, but at least he doesn't try to talk Nate out of it anymore. Instead, he just settles down next to Nate's leg and gently holds his hands above the swollen skin there. Nate's not about to bring it up, seeing as he's not a _complete_ asshole, but they both know Nick isn't exactly the authority on what the human body can or can't take. He's got the memories, sure, but walking around for decades with half the skin on your face straight-up missing really has to screw with your sense of an average human's tolerance.

Nate's fine. Completely fine. Nick'll have to stop worrying soon enough.

“Okay,” Nate says. He takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. Opens them again. “Just… slide it back where it should be.”

That, at least, Nick doesn't need any instruction on. He takes a deep breath—out of habit or out of some necessity, Nate's not sure—and then cautiously, inexorably, forces Nate's leg back into position.

The pain is—

It's—

Not great. Not… not fun. Nate bites down on the back of his hand to keep from screaming; his teeth dig harder and harder into the skin there until he tastes coppery blood. It's a red-hot sort of agony, worse with every moment he has to endure it, and it's all Nate can do not to beg Nick to stop.

He can't, he reminds himself. The thought cuts through the haze of sickening pain. Nick is doing this as a favor to him—despite all his misgivings, despite his discomfort. If Nate backed out now, he'd only feel worse about it. 

_Steady on_ , he imagines his commanding officer saying to him. He never liked the bastard, yet it's that voice that comes to him in times like these before even his wife's. Some memories run deep.

Carefully, Nate pulls his hands away from his mouth. He forces himself to grab the long pieces of scrap metal he'd set aside for this purpose. Breathe in, breathe out. Don't think about anything except your next move.

He splints the leg with shaking hands, forcing himself to work slower for every shudder of pain he can't hold back. There's something perverse about it, really; like he wants to prove he can still suffer, that he still knows how to survive. It's nothing he wants to be psychoanalyzing about himself right this minute.

Once's he's finally well and truly done—every metal rod in place, every strip of duct tape secured and double checked—he lets himself collapse into a puddle of misery. A whine slips out from between clenched teeth as he lets his head fall back against the ground. His heart's racing and he's breathing like he just challenged a feral to a footrace; it's all he can do to keep the wetness pooling in the corners of his eyes from turning into actual tears. Nate has some pride, after all. Hes had far worse than this, he reminds himself, and anyway he'd look damn foolish if he went and lectured Nick about how he could take the pain only to fall apart right after.

"Okay," he hisses out, "I think—I think I'll take that Med-X now, if you're offering?"

"Sure you don't want to walk it off, tough guy?" Nick asks drily, but he doesn't hesitate a moment before taking Nate's arm in his sleek, mismatched hands and sliding the needle home into the vein at the crook of his elbow.

Relief comes in waves, radiating out from the point of injection. One heartbeat and the bruises on his shoulders don't ache anymore, two and the headache pounding in his temple starts to feel distant and soft. On three it finally makes its way down to his leg, and it's all Nate can do not to sob in relief as the sharp agony there finally starts to fade.

"Ah," he says. For a second there he'd almost forgotten what it felt like _not_ to constantly be holding back a scream. "Fuck, Nick, you're a hero."

"I bet you say that to all the bots."

"Only the handsome ones. Promise."

Nick's face isn't built for microexpressions, but over the years Nate's learned to read the smaller things there. The anxious tension written in the tightness around his eyes and the slight frown pulling at his mouth eases when Nate smiles up at him, like he's only just finally realized that Nate _isn't_ about to die here. (In fairness, it's just starting to sink in for Nate too. Realizing he's going to live to see another day is a fucking amazing feeling.)

"The way you're flattering me, I imagine you'll be wanting that stimpak now." 

"I mean, I was getting really attached to the idea of getting carried around in a palanquin, but if you're offering..." Nate trails off, faux-casual, and he can't help the way his heart leaps when Nick gives him a small, helpless, genuine laugh in return. 

Getting his leg fucked by a super mutant with a grudge and a sledgehammer was worth it to get that smile out of Nick, he decides. He'd run right back out there and do it again, even—but no, that's probably the Med-X talking. And anyway Nick would most definitely kill him if he tried that stunt a second time.

Nick pops the sterile cap on the syringe of the stimpak he's carrying, pumps it once to make sure the pressure's still there, but when he leans back in to find the vein once more Nate surprises him by reaching up, grabbing the lapels of his coat, and pulling him in for a kiss.

He makes a noise of surprise against Nate's lips, and then the hand not clutching the stimpak tangles in Nate's clothes and Nick opens his mouth and they're properly kissing, warm and raspy and wonderful. Nick's mouth is drier than an organic person's, and he tastes of nothing so much as concentrated cigarette smoke, but—well, it's part of the charm by now, every bit as endearing as his bright eyes and his easy charisma and his habit of quoting long-dead pre-war poets at the weirdest goddamn times. Already Nate's body is sitting up and taking interest; heat pools in his belly, and if not for his horribly mangled leg he might have been tempted to take his chances on their hideously unsafe surroundings (concrete and dirt and bits of skeletons lying around, what an ambiance) and just jump him here and now.

When Nick pulls away, he's breathing a little harder. A psychosomatic response, according to him, and one Nate's always thrilled to be able to pull out of him. It makes him look good. Highlights the way his body moves and how his metal parts catch and scatter the dim light.

"Well," he says, trying to be stern and failing, "Congratulations. I think you might've managed to pick the _worst_ place in the Commonwealth for a kiss."

"You're not thinking hard enough," Nate says. He holds up a finger. "The deck of the Prydwen." A second. "The Institute labs." A third. "The old art gallery, _right_ in front of those paintings Pickman put together."

The face Nick makes has Nate wishing he'd brought a camera. Or that he owned a camera at all, really. "Well, I hope you've had your fill of... contact, because I may never be able to kiss again."

" _Nick_!" Nate protests, leaning up to draw him in once more, but when Nick puts a hand on his chest and presses him back down to the ground Nate goes with it easy enough.

"Hold still, now," Nick says, "and let me actually get you walking again."

Nate lies back with a sigh and lets Nick smooth over the skin of his arm until the syringe presses against the crook of his elbow and slides home. It hits him slow—not much in the way of pain relief, not like Med-X, but knowing his bones are about to finally decide to settle in and stay where they ought to is a high sweeter than any painkiller—and when Nick runs a hand through Nate's sweat-soaked hair he just makes a soft sound of contentment and tries to squirm a little closer.

He'll try jumping Nick's titanium bones later, when Nick's forgiven him properly for his boneheaded battle strategy and when they're back someplace with four proper walls and a ceiling. For now, he's more than content to lean back, let his eyes slip closed, and focus on Nick's hand against his skin and the soft humming noises his body makes.

It's good, like this. He could stay this way a while.


End file.
